Monster Scholar

This week’s zombie kill is an interspecies double whammy brought to you by the lovely but always deadly Mila Jovovich of Resident Evil . For Mila’s first truly inspiring zombie kill, she takes down a total of eight zombie Dobermans transformed into vicious killing machines by the spread of the T-virus. Stuck on one of the lower levels of the Hive, Umbrella’s underground research facility, she narrowly escapes being eaten by one zombie dog. After shutting a metal door in its face she breathes a sigh of relief, but it’s shortlived as she turns around to face a pack of seven zombified dogs with nasty looking teeth and claws. Luckily Mila is a quick draw, and she takes them out one by one with her handy Umbrella issue handgun. But just when she’s run out of bullets, the first zombie Doberman crashes into the room through an unsecured glass window. Out of ammo, Mila chucks her gun and uses the wall to catapult herself into the air. With a kung fu kick, she punts the undead beast as it leap

Thanks to Shock Till You Drop , the trailer for the latest release by Lionsgate has taken the web by storm and the horror blog-o-sphere has been buzzing about the newest vampire movie to contribute to the the rise of bloodsuckers in 21st century film. Daybreakers stars Ethan Hawke as Edward Dalton who works as the chief hematologist at Bromley Marks Pharmecueticals , the leading supplier of farmed blood for the world's vampire population.The lab itself is like something out of the Matrix, with rows upon rows of humans suspended in midair as machines gather their blood, a much more sophisticated operation than the blood farms depicted in the vampire film Blade Trinity . It seems like these vampires are on top of world, until their blood supply beings to run out and the search for a blood-substitute hits a wall. Without their food supply, the vampires revert into hideous creatures that resemble a much scarier version of Gary Oldman's bat-man in Bram Stoker's Dracula .

Momentum Pictures has released a one-sheet teaser for Dorian Gray , their dark version of Oscar Wilde’s timeless tale set to be released in the US in April of 2009. Ben Barnes, who you might recognize as Prince Caspian from the Narnia films, is cast in the lead role of the eternally beautiful Dorian who remains unscathed as his portrait bears to brunt of his infernal sins. With his good looks it’s no wonder Barnes scored the part, and it got me thinking about all the other pretty boys who have taken on the role of Dorian Gray over the years. Hurd Hatfield appeared in the 1945 MGM production of The Picture of Dorian Gray, as the young man with a vain wish to remain always young and beautiful.The role of Dorian Gray was the high point of Hatfield’s career and almost became the end of it. He had only been in one other film, Dragon Seed (1944) where he portrayed a Chinese peasant, but soon after finding success with Picture his film career took a downturn. He would comment later that

“You’ve done terrible things. Be strong”--Anthony Hopkins The Wolfman A bootleg trailer for 2009's The Wolfman was leaked to the internet back in July of 2008 and I just got a chance to see it and share some thoughts. It has a distinctive Sleepy Hollow feel to it with its depiction of a dreary 1880s London and the isolated inhabitants of the town being threatened by a ravenous beast. Cinematically my favorite part of the trailer was the shot of a terrified Emily Blunt hiding behind a tree while a wolfish Benicio can be seen in the background. An interesting thing I gleaned from the trailer is that the film’s treatment of the werewolf might go beyond just the physical transformation and explore the concept of lycanthropy as a mental disease. Toro is depicted bound in a straight jacket in the middle of a crowded operating theater and screams “I will kill all of you!” as his hands turn into claws. His immersion in ice water also resembles a kind of turn of the century calming treatme

Michael Jackson died today after suffering a heart attack at the age of fifty. Tragically, Jackson was set to begin a musical tour that was to mark the comeback of the pop superstar and which could have signaled a new album for the music icon. Michael Jackson's influence has been felt the world over, as his music and videos shaped a generation of artists. My fondest memory of Jackson is of course his music video for Thriller . It went beyond the other videos of its time to become a cinematic experience, one that I both loved and dreaded once the lights went out in our living room. I remember sitting with mouth agape as I watched Jackson and his horde of zombies get down with moves I had never seen before and would later try to imitate. As the velvet tones of Vincent Price were heard on the voice over I squirmed with gooseflesh, almost feeling the cold grip of the grisly ghouls closing in to seal my doom. I once scared the living day ligths out of my best friend Stacy when I changed

The winner of this week's zombie kill(s) is Ben from George A Romero's, Night of the Living Dead. Ben is calm and assertive under pressure and takes charge when Barbara, traumatized from a zombie attack remains comatose dead weight. Before boarding up the house he beats two zombies to death with a crow bar, and when a zombie wanders into the house and tries to attack a dazed Barbara, Ben bludgeons the corpse and later sets it on fire in the back yard. Ben continues to do more than his fair share of zombie killing and with a shotgun takes out 5-10 more of the undead as he and Tom make a break for the gas pump beside the barn. After the escape attempt fails and the zombies breach the house, Ben takes shelter in the cellar where the zombified Karen Cooper has finished dining on her recently deceased parents. Ben refrains from dispatching the child zombie and pushes her aside, but when he finds himself alone with the newly risen corpses of Harry and Helen Cooper he plugs them both

Sony pictures is coming out with a remake of the original 1987 slasher The Stepfather , starring Dylan Walsh from Nip/Tuck as the shady father figure David Harris and Sela Hardin as Susan Harding, the single mother of three who marries him. Their family is picture perfect as David takes the kids to movies, the arcade and and still has enough time left over to shower his new wife with affection. But Susan's teenage son Michael begins to suspect that his stepfather isn't what he seems when their elderly next door neighbor thinks she recognizes him from an episode of America's Most Wanted. Michael does some web research and finds out the killer featured on AMW is wanted in the slaying of an entire family. As it turns out David is the killer and his modis operandi is searching for the perfect family by marrying single women with kids. But when that family doesn't live up to his expectations, he disposes of them and moves on to the next target. Things start to fall apart a

Set to hit select theaters in the US July 31st, the latest film from director Chan-wook Park centers around a frustrated priest played Kang-ho Song, who you might recognize as the bumbling older brother of the little girl abducted by sea monsters in the Korean horror movie The Host . But Song has come a long way from playing the comic relief, and here he takes on a much more serious and brooding role as a man of the cloth who is disillusioned with God because of the suffering people have to go through in this life to get to the next. In this frame of mind, he volunteers himself to be a guinea pig for a vaccine to cure the deadly F.I.V. virus. But instead of curing the disease he contracts it and it leaves him with a hunger for human blood. The trailer (especially the last part) left me with the same creeped out feeling I got from watching Takeshi Miike's Audition . There is a similair tension and a disgusted treatment of sex that I sense from both films that is sure to put some on

To hype the release of Zombieland set to hit theaters in October, for the next couple of weeks I will be posting a Zombie Kill of the Week were I will feature one of the many inventive, horrifying and comedic ways we have found to dispatch the undead. This week's winner is the crew from Shaun of the Dead who take on the zombified owner of the Winchester pub, where they have sought shelter from the zombie apocalypse. As Queen's "Don't Stop Me Now" plays on the jukebox, Shaun, Liz and Ed begin whacking away at said zombie with pool cues in the time to the music. Liz breaks away and wallops him with a fire extinguisher and then Shaun finally shoves the zombie's head into the jukebox, killing him and the music.

The answer is no. I watched the first Final Destination when I was in my teens, when the idea of death stalking survivors of a disaster was fresh and innovative for its time. But through two sequels the concept of death coming after clueless teenagers has been done to death, and has become an excuse to stage ridiculously elaborate death sequences (the plate glass death caused by pigeons in FD2 and tanning bed from FD3 come to mind). Even though it inspired two more films, the first Final Destination ultimately falls short as a horror film. In the beginning the film has a lot of promise as it starts to play with ideas of post traumatic stress and teenagers thinking they are indestructible, but it never develops any of these concepts past the introduction stage. Instead as the film progresses it drops all pretense of actually saying something meaningful and collapses under the weight if its own ridiculousness (Devon Sawa thinking he was going to die of tetanus from a rusty fishing h

Don't fear the end of the world. Fear what happens next. From Ridley Scott’s Alien to 2001: A Space Odyssey , the science fiction-horror hybrid has found boundless success with its crossover genre appeal. The next film looking to capitalize on this combination is Pandorum . The film, set to be released in April 2009 features Dennis Quaid (Lieutenant Payton) and Ben Foster (Corporal Bower) playing a pair astronauts who awake from suspended animation without any memory of who they are and what their mission is aboard an abandoned spacecraft. But as Bower sets out determined to find his missing wife and the others, he discovers that he’s not alone in the darkness. The ship is crawling with albino-looking creature s that resemble something out of Neil Marshall’s The Descent . At first Bower thinks these alien beasts are the reason the passengers are missing until it’s revealed that they are the passengers themselves. They have been transformed into monstrous creatures by pandorum, the

To commemorate the release of The Final Destination in theaters this summer, here are my favorite deaths from the Final Destination series. Terry Chaney gets hit by a bus after telling her boyfriend Carter to “drop dead” Ms. Valerie Lewton can’t seem to catch a break and dies when her computer shoots a glass shard into her throat, her kitchen catches fire and she is skewered by a knife while reaching for a dish rag. A piece of metal shrapnel propelled by a passing train slices Billy Hitchcock’s head in half while he’s yelling at Carter that he’ll be the next to die. Lucky lottery winner Evan Lewis narrowly escapes being blown up by his microwave, but he eventually gets his due after slipping on a pile of discarded spaghetti in an alley and is jabbed in the eye by the fire escape ladder. Rory the drug addict serves as comic relief until he is diced by a pair of flying logs connected by barbed wire. The anonymous farmer’s son is saved from death when Rory pulls him out of the way of an

I recently watched Let the Right One In and got to thinking about my favorite kid vampires. They’re cute, they’re adorable and they’re out for your blood. Here is my list of the top five. Eli -I will admit that like most of you Claudia from Interview with the Vampire was at the top of my list…until now. Lina Leandersson pulls of the role of child vampire Eli in the Swedish vampire flick Let the Right One In with subtle grace and she’s only thirteen! Eli is trapped in a child’s body and dependent on her human caretaker Hakan to supply her with blood. But after Hakan bites the big one, Eli reveals that she is a vamp in every sense of the word as she canoodles a boy named Oskar into becoming her new caretaker. Claudia - Kirsten Dunst’s breakout performance (which included a kiss with Brad Pitt) in Interview with a Vampire has gone unrivaled until recently. The orphan Claudia is turned into a vampire by Lestat to blackmail Louis into staying with him, making them into one big happy va

There’s something delightfully tawdry about a former A-list star taking on the leading role in a low budget horror film. The two most famous examples that come to mind are the former Hollywood starlets Joan Crawford and Bette Davis who, nearing the end of their careers starred as objects of horror in the psychological thriller Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962). Another more modern exemplar is actress Lucy Lui who, after starring in high budget action flicks like Kill Bill and the Charlie’s Angel s trilogy appeared as the lead in the vampire film Rise: Blood Hunter (2007). Looking at these actresses’ careers it’s clear that the genre of horror is the last stop on the Hollywood Gravy Train. So when I got a glimpse of the trailer for the “action-packed, apocalyptic, horror, thriller” The Devil’s Tomb starring Oscar winner Cuba Gooding Jr. (?!??) I had to take a closer look. The premise of The Devil’s Tomb is reminiscent of the first Resident Evil or even Doom . A team of speci

Allison Hayes starred as the original fifty foot woman in the 1958 science fiction film Attack of the Fifty Foot Woman directed by Nathan Hertz for Allied Artists Pictures. Hayes plays Nancy Archer, an ex-alcoholic heiress, whose husband Harry is hungry for the fortune she just inherited from her father so he can go on permanent vacation with his mistress Honey Parker. But things don’t go according to plan, and Nancy catches Harry flirting with Honey at a local nightspot. She hits the road and encounters a being from out of this world that needs diamonds to fuel his spaceship, and it just so happens that Nancy is wearing one. Nancy is left unharmed during this first encounter, but when she tells her story everyone including her husband thinks she’s a prime candidate for a padded room in an upscale asylum. Nancy is determined to prove she’s not crazy and has Harry drive her through the desert in search of the spacecraft. They find the alien craft, but when the alien shows up Harry aban